


Aeye

by speckledsolanaceae



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Artificial Intelligence, Espionage, Hijacking, Long Lost Lover, M/M, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-18
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:47:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 13,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27027568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/speckledsolanaceae/pseuds/speckledsolanaceae
Summary: People mired in espionage were supposed to be careful, to understand that certain attachments might lead to loss and therefore unaffordable debilitation. They were protected individuals—their identities and lives a secret—but work attachments were a no-go for good reason.Agents got hurt, caught, ruined, relocated, buried.And yet.
Relationships: Wong Kun Hang | Hendery/Wong Yuk Hei | Lucas
Comments: 17
Kudos: 64





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [violetpeche](https://archiveofourown.org/users/violetpeche/gifts).



> All tws/cws applicable to each chapter will be listed in the author's notes.
> 
> Thank you to Sparrow, Cooper, Elton, Rain, and the GhFs for checking over things for me ♡.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: blood, injury

**THE STORY**

Yukhei was already halfway to the building fire escape when the alarms went off, flashing green and blue for _intruder, intruder, intruder._ In his earpiece was “Closing in, Lucas,” and he had his rod unsheathed before he even got to the unlocked door. 

When he flung it open, he had a single split second to get his bearings before he was lunging for the fire escape exit, crashing into the safe space above the bar before they—this person, lithe and reeling back in dark blue gear not dissimilar to his own—could reach it. 

Without hesitation, Yukhei swung in the meager light of the bottom floor, aiming for their knees and instead getting a sharp block to his wrist from the toe of the intruder’s boot. Yukhei’s nerves lanced with pain and he fumbled with his rod for one moment before shifting stances, broad body blocking the escape. 

The breath rising and falling in the intruder’s chest was a smooth rhythm, but rapid and sharp under the mask that covered their mouth. Their eyes, forehead, every patch of visible skin above it was painted a dark bluish-gray, hood cinched around the curves of their face in slick, tailored cloth. 

Nothing stood out aside from the contacts obscuring their irises, a burning tawny held by black eyelashes and a focused brow. 

Yukhei only had as long as to search what existed of their face before they were feinting and he was trying to block them with a sore wrist holding up his rod and a knee aimed at their midriff. Though he missed with his knee, the rod clipped their shoulder, tensing their punch so that Yukhei could just block it with his free and open hand. He just barely moved his head out of the way in time, avoiding their palm aimed for the underside of his chin. They swept over, instead, and rammed their elbow into his arm, twisting out of his immediate range until he made another attempt with the rod. 

They took the blow to their forearm with a gasp and a hiss, but it was only to get to Yukhei’s wrist again, hooking his hand in the bend of their elbow. Yukhei shifted, kicking in to catch their legs, then completely missed their free hand whipping up and crashing into his earpiece. 

It shouldn’t have broken, but it did—instantly and painfully, blasting his inner ear with sound, heat, pain as he cringed, hand coming up to capture the fractured tech and the blood leaking from his ear. Alarmed, he wrenched himself back and swung down hard on the juncture of their shoulder with the rod they’d failed to pry from him. 

They ducked, but gave into a whine of pain as Yukhei finally got them in the abdomen with his leg. Something cracked in their body—Yukhei could feel it—and they staggered. 

With a cough, the intruder’s eyes wilder now and wet with pain, they feinted again, and Yukhei failed a second time to predict their next move. Instead of hitting him or taking a blow in an effort to complete their own, they dodged right into his space, hooked down their mask, and brushed his uninjured but buzzing ear with their lips just as backup was slamming in through one of the doors above them. 

“You look good, Yukhei.” 

Their voice was low, the texture of it in so few words still soft and distinct, and Yukhei froze up as they slipped out of his arms. 

“Kunha—” He did not dodge the blow to his temple, nor did he see what happened after that. 

**{DELETE: CLASSIFIED}**

He was running out of time. The voice in his ear was telling him he had minutes — not to get this done, but to get out. 

Access Denied

Access Denied

Access Denied

“Please let me in,” he said, and typed in the last possible sequence before it would be too late. If he didn’t leave immediately, he’d have to pull his own plug. Was this stubbornness worth his life? 

. . .

The system went blank with a single wink. He stood, stunned for a crucial moment. 

Then the computer seemed to explode with a stream of electric blue and white, striking him across the face with a deafening crack, and it was so unspeakably painful that all he could do was mimic a scream. 

It scraped against the inside of his skull. 

And ripped something free. 

He heard a click somewhere in his mind, a soft trill, and then, as if everything had always been pushed three inches to the left and he hadn’t realized it, his existence corrected itself into a more perfect calibration than he’d ever known it could have — all with one agonizing pendulum swing. 

Several ideas came to him at once as he heaved breath, hands on the ground on either side of his knees, blood drooling from his mouth, and despite there also being blood running down his face and his vision tinted pink, badly blurry and stinging, there was only one idea he could act on: Run. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [twitter](https://twitter.com/speckledsolana)   
>  [curiouscat](https://t.co/zW26zmaxzw?amp=1)   
> 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: mentions of a _false_ death, injury, breakdown/panic attack (not in-depth)

**WHERE WERE WE?**

Three years. Something like that. It had been three years since Wong Kunhang had died. Yukhei didn’t remember the exact date. He hadn’t memorized or stared at a calendar, etching numbers into his brain. 

The agency had informed their staff that agent Hendery had pulled his own plug, and absolutely nothing—not sleep not friends not time—had grounded Yukhei anymore. 

So it had been something like three years, and Yukhei could still forgive Kunhang for kicking his ass. Especially now. Especially since he _wasn’t_ dead. Yukhei knew that voice and had kissed it right from those very lips. He was convinced, looking in retrospect, that the person he hadn’t recognized before was now irrefutably Kunhang: the shape of their eyes even though the color had been wrong, their long torso on that narrow body, their absolute bastard precision that had badly damaged both Yukhei’s wrist and ear. 

His wrist was an easy fix, though it was still repairing, and it was only due to his nanotech’s healing capabilities that his inner ear was still intact—the same nanotech that was allegedly fucked by the electric shock his broken earpiece had given him and was going to force him to go in for recalibration. He’d had tinnitus for almost an entire day, now, a faint ringing that, instead of driving Yukhei up the nearest wall, reminded him that this was Kunhang’s fault. 

And what a wonderful thing. Objectively, that is, because subjectively, Yukhei had to lie through his teeth. 

“He corrupted the original files agent Two extracted last week from Vision—” 

“How do you know they’re a he?” asked Yukhei, sunken into one of many occupied office chairs at the conference table. It was a casual briefing concerning the break-in to their agency, Weishen, no thanks to agent Lucas (himself, still a little stunned and grasping at straws). The tinted windows across from Yukhei looked out on a painted cityscape, red from the dying sun, the buildings like teeth biting into an apple haze. 

“Is he not?” 

Yukhei redirected his attention to Sun Zhikun, the man at the head of the room and the current authority, who looked understandably but fallaciously annoyed at being interrupted. Sun Zhikun interrupted Cao Lu, his superior no less, at least three times for every briefing she directed. 

“I fought them, and I couldn’t tell,” Yukhei said. “They didn’t have their genitals out.” And even then…but he wasn’t going to split hairs over gender. Sun Zhikun was the type of man to think having a 50/50 sparring record with a woman was some kind of failing, so there were other preconceptions to knock out of that inflated noggin first. 

“But he beat you, so,” Sun Zhikun said, and ah, there it was. 

“They beat me. Song used to beat me all the time.” Across from him with her cheek against her fist, Yuqi’s eyes filled with mirth. She still had him calling uncle every once in a while, though most of their sessions ended with a draw these days. 

“Maybe,” said Sun Zhikun, “we should have sent her, then.” 

Yukhei laughed. “If we had time, I would have encouraged it, but I was the first one there because I was the closest north wing agent on site, not because I’m the best.” 

Sun Zhikun dismissed him with a flippant wrist flick, and Yukhei sank back into his chair. Yuqi gave him a little eyebrow raise of amusement. 

_“They_ corrupted the original files agent Two extracted last week from Vision,” Sun Zhikun said with a little more force, this time gesturing to Two himself, who’d been gnawing at his thumbnail for the past ten minutes. “We’re saying ‘original’ because we don’t know if h—they copied the data first.” 

“Safe to assume it’s Vision who infiltrated, then, isn’t it?” Yiren said from Yukhei’s left, who’d been the agent entering the fire escape the very moment Kunhang had knocked Yukhei out. She’d said she thought he’d gotten his brains blown out given the state of his ear, and Yukhei could only imagine. Blood leaking out the side of someone’s head would have certainly made him suspect the same. 

Sun Zhikun conceded with a nod, and Yukhei tried to relax. He had no idea with whom Kunhang was affiliated—he just couldn’t possibly be in Weishen’s agent ranks anymore. It wouldn’t make any sense. 

All Yukhei knew was that the intruder had definitely been Kunhang, and that those now-corrupted files had everything to do with “agent Hendery”’s death. The files Two had copied from Vision were the same files that Kunhang had been sent and failed to copy three years ago. It had been Two’s job last week to get them, and Yukhei was his backup during that mission, and now they both knew. 

“I wish they hadn’t assigned you to this,” Two—or just Yangyang—had said at the time. 

“They don’t know why not,” Yukhei had replied, “and neither do you.” 

Yangyang had nodded, then, and shed that skin of reluctance and empathy to get the job done. Yangyang hadn’t died or gone AWOL like Kunhang had, and Yukhei had no idea what had gone differently. 

**{ DELETE. WHO IS THIS?}**

Even after flushing his eyes, the right one was still red — the blood vessels had been ruptured so badly that he looked downright monstrous, and his skin was mottled and pink around it with starburst shapes, striations, and deeply bruised skin. 

But he could still see. He could still see, but better, and in a way that made his head throb and protest, slinking around his skull like a begging child. 

“Why am I not dead yet?” 

As if he’d known he should have been dead by now. 

The answer came quietly, subtle, like his own mind had conjured up the answer: he wasn’t dead yet because whatever was in him had commandeered the nanotech. 

There was something in him. 

He knew what it was. 

It took him five seconds to realize he was hyperventilating and five more to have a complete and utter breakdown over the hotel bathroom sink. 

**They were controlling you,** his brain told him. 

“I know.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [twitter](https://twitter.com/speckledsolana)   
>  [curiouscat](https://t.co/zW26zmaxzw?amp=1)   
> 


	3. Chapter 3

**FOCUS PLEASE.**

The tinnitus disappeared the night right before Yukhei was set to get his nanotech checked, but he went in anyway just in case. 

“It fixed itself,” said the lab assistant an hour or so after Yukhei shook himself back into lucidity. He could feel the skin prickling around his ears where they had stuck him with needles in his unconsciousness. Agents could connect to basic systems no problem, but when it came to repair and recalibration, it was important to have them under. 

“Oh,” Yukhei said. 

“They’re fully calibrated—we didn’t have to do anything,” the lab assistant assured him as they sent him on his way. “You should be fine.” 

He felt fine, physically, all traces of the stairwell encounter now disappeared in less than a few days. 

In the place of the tinnitus was the realization that Yukhei might never see Kunhang again. Why would he? No one at Weishen had seen hide or hair from him for so long that Yukhei had forgotten he was grieving. 

He sat on his bed at the end of the day and wondered if he’d been lucky, or if he’d been better off not knowing. 

**~~{SOMETHING'S WRONG}~~**

At initiation, every agent at Weishen was given nanotech, originally designed by the technology company “Vision” and worked into their blood and body like a new kind of blood cell. It was the new insurance — it could both heal internal damages and allow the agent to kill themselves, or “unplug,” if the missions went too far south to be salvageable. 

With Aeye, it was different. 

It took two and a half days for him to realize that his right eye was the core of his changes, then two more to come to terms with the thing inside his head. 

Artificial Intelligence — and not the human kind. The computer kind. The kind that dissected things and built permutations, the kind that was impossible to beat at chess and sewed together ideas and the subjectivities of its host until facts arose in a fresh, opalescent sheen. 

Aeye, then, he’d decided was its name, not that it needed one. It thought with him, not next to him. It didn’t think he was clever if only because it didn’t have opinions. Only data. It told him that “Aeye” had been used for some time now by this and that company, business, franchise, and he had to come to terms with the fact that he was going to be a much drier person from now on — at least inside his own head. 

In any case, the nanotech in Aeye’s hands behaved differently. It healed him in a manner of days, though the Lichtenberg figures stayed. It turned on devices and searched the web for his questions before he’d even reached them. 

It wasn’t that Aeye couldn’t tell him everything instantly; he just processed things better when he could see them, even as he could think faster, imagine faster, envision with more clarity. He was still human. He just had more. 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: loss

**CAREFUL**

People mired in espionage were supposed to be careful, to understand that certain attachments might lead to loss and therefore unaffordable debilitation. They were protected individuals—their identities and lives a secret—but work attachments were a no-go for good reason. 

Agents got hurt, caught, ruined, relocated, buried. 

And yet. 

It had taken years of friendship for them to realize the way they did things looked and felt a lot like courtship. For Yukhei, it was linking ankles under tables during stolen-away dinners, feeling the flutter of breathlessness at Kunhang’s laugh, those walks they would take around the Weishen building during breaks, then seeing Kunhang in one of his shirts after drinking the night away (and Yukhei desperately wanting to lift it off him like that same pawned heart ticking slowly in Kunhang’s hands). 

The first time Yukhei had kissed him, Kunhang had laughed and gripped the front of his shirt over the sunbeams in Yukhei’s lungs. 

They were supposed to be careful, but some risks were worth it. Some were worth lifetimes and losing sleep and sobbing over the cactus plant he hadn’t managed to keep alive after Kunhang was no longer there to save Yukhei’s dead thumbs. 

Yukhei used to dream about him. 

He’d wake up with so much hope in his chest and throat. 

And then lie there, pining like he had at the beginning before he’d known what Kunhang had tasted like—but worse. The kind of pining that scratched lines of blood down his throat and called him a fool, an idiot, for still wanting someone who was gone. 

Work had never been compromised, but he’d changed a little, actively shifting to accommodate or soothe or compensate for someone he could name but never quantify. Kunhang: too much, not enough, everything, no longer. 

**{STOP. STOP READ̵I̶N̸͍̒G̶͌ͅ.}**

It unraveled itself slowly in his brain, which ached and throbbed for days before respite, and then days again. 

When Weishen installed the nanotechs in agents’ bodies, it was agreed-upon that it was a closed network. It was to give them an extra boost and, in turn, give Weishen greater security — instead of cyanide, there were these little things that would kill the agent as quickly and painlessly as a pulled plug upon the agent’s command. The nanos could also be connected to a narrow network for communication and calibration. On missions, the agents could hook up to a set network so their vitals, location, and other details could be tracked, but it was a closed loop, and they could only be tracked or logged then. Outside of missions, the nanotech would occasionally need recalibration if they got damaged, which they very rarely did.

This was the agreement.

And that was not the reality.

Weishen’s nanotechnology, divorced from Vision’s original codes, crossed all moral lines. Agents were logged and tracked 24/7 — their vitals and health, their transcripted interactions, their constant location, their sight — and their life was not their own. Weishen could pull their plug at any time, which meant he owed Aeye his life.

But, with that said, he felt constantly on the verge of keeling over the sanity cliff.

He treated his condition like a concussion because, in the muddle of accelerating thoughts in his head that made running into walls and passing out a perpetuity, that is what they came up with together.

He drew, mostly. Doodled mindlessly as his brain sorted things out. Sometimes he couldn’t see what he was drawing, one eye hindered by migraines and the other feeling too swollen and pinched to manage anything at all. He only cooked when he had the coordination for it, at strong risk of cutting off his own fingers and only marginally able to stomach complex take-out. He lived off rice, soup, and raw vegetables for two entire weeks, even the most mild flavors giving him headaches.

Aeye took its time recalibrating his body — not because it was difficult, but because it was trying not to kill him. It wasn’t just commandeering. That was something it could do from the start. Steering the wheel was different than becoming the wheel.

His eyes were the first thing to sort themselves out, Aeye a tawny brown while his original stayed dark and unchanged. It was only then that either of them agreed he could take on some form of unskilled labor, tremors and chronic pain be damned. He couldn’t access his funds anymore — anything tied to his previous identity was fucked by the nature of his body getting hijacked by something that was far more consensual than a hand moving pawns. He’d been living off cold cash, physically and mentally unable to leak money to himself through the internet just yet.

He was still doodling portraits of Yukhei to battle the migraines.

Something as complicated as the internet was too much — coming to terms with what he’d lost was enough

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How we doing so far?
> 
> [twitter](https://twitter.com/speckledsolana)   
>  [curiouscat](https://t.co/zW26zmaxzw?amp=1)   
> 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw: panic attack

**W1Y301132052HK-18: RESTRICTED**

After all this time, his memory wasn’t reliable—the only things Yukhei could remember for sure were the moments he’d already treasured at the moment they’d happened. The ones he’d already determined not to lose. The rest were gone. There was a sort of silent agreement in relationships where the passage of time would be permissible, given that memory was so faulty, only because new memories would be made. 

Yukhei only had one new memory with Kunhang, now, and it was rapidly becoming unhealthy. He knew it, but couldn’t figure out how to stop obsessing over it. He would give up a limb to be able to move through time, somehow, and _realize_ that that was Kunhang’s body and Kunhang’s sounds of pain, and take that moment to hug him instead. 

“If you could have a super power, what would it be?” he’d asked Kunhang once. This was a memory Yukhei could remember—not because it was particularly groundbreaking, but because of how warm it had felt. He was lying back between Kunhang’s legs, head on his chest, tucked up on the tiny-ass apartment couch that Yukhei was too attached to and couldn’t sell. Kunhang was working his fingers gently through Yukhei’s roots, plucking softly at individual hairs and telling Yukhei whenever he found a gray or one of a slightly different color. 

Kunhang hummed in thought, smoothing his touch over Yukhei’s forehead and brow until Yukhei was compelled to close his eyes in order to enjoy it—he was able to feel every callus and ridge, and wondered how it was that he could love even those. 

“When I was little, I always thought it’d be cool to be the human torch,” Kunhang said, rubbing at Yukhei’s ears and making Yukhei drum his fingers around Kunhang’s calf in a shiver. 

“Hot, you mean.” 

“I wasn’t that clever.” 

Yukhei buried a chuckle in his own shoulder, basking while Kunhang ran his hands down his chest and settled his fingers against Yukhei’s ribs, stroking there idly. He wasn’t able to see Kunhang smile, but it was audible when he asked, “And you?” 

“I’m not clever, but I’m very hot,” Yukhei said, immediately feeling Kunhang stretch under him as he tossed his head back over the arm of the couch and laughed, fingertips pinching into Yukhei’s skin. _I love you,_ was a breath away on Yukhei’s lips. 

“I meant a super power, you hot silly,” Kunhang said, mirth and endearment clotting his voice as he thwacked Yukhei’s pec. 

Yukhei didn’t feel like flinching for the drama of it—just sitting up and turning around, clumsy with one knee slipping off the cushions as Kunhang looked at him with such calm warmth, sizzling down from his squeaky laughter. Kunhang had the most beautiful face. “Keeping things,” Yukhei said. 

Again, Kunhang hummed, shifting to change his position now that Yukhei’s weight wasn’t on him. “How do you mean?” 

“I miss my mom’s cooking,” Yukhei began, cupping his hands over Kunhang’s knees and slowly sliding them down the smooth curve of his thighs. Kunhang started to grin at him, one corner of his mouth curling. “And I miss you when I don’t see you. And like. The flowers during the spring. I wish I could just have and keep the things I love. Whenever I want.” 

That curve of Kunhang’s mouth was contagious as Yukhei stole his lips. “I’m a free man,” Kunhang murmured. “You can’t keep me.” 

At the time, that declaration had coaxed more kissing and laughter because of course. Of course. 

Yukhei still wouldn’t deny it now, but the irony of fate stung. 

**{I̶͐̉͗̊ SAI̶̓̌D̴̡̢̺̙̄͝ can you hear me?}**

He got a job restocking at a grocery mart. 

The first time he bruised a fruit, he forgot not to think. His mind went into overdrive — **chemical compounds in the fruit are oxidized when the skin of the fruit** — please stop — **and hence the walls and membranes of the cells within the fruit** — his vision was swimming as he accidentally rapped his knuckles on the floor trying to pick up the pear, missing, heaving in a breath, pain crickling through his hand — **is ruptured, allowing oxygen in. These chemical compounds react with oxygen, usually incorporating it into their molecular structure.**

“Is everything alright back there?” the owner called from the front while he tried to fumble the pear into the original basket again. 

**Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo** — “Yes,” he gasped, leaning hard into the plate he was supposed to be stocking — **is usually triggered by specific changes in cranial positioning.** “Just dizzy.” 

**You’re having a panic attack. We’re experiencing a panic attack.**

“I know,” he breathed, muffling his mouth with his palm and squeezing his eyes closed. 

**in 2 3 4 out 2 3 4 in 2 3 4 out 2 3 4**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [twitter](https://twitter.com/speckledsolana)   
>  [curiouscat](https://t.co/zW26zmaxzw?amp=1)   
> 


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw: mental breakdown

**STOP THINKING ABOUT IT**

Cao Lu’s office was the most spartan, modern space Yukhei had ever seen—it never failed to make him feel like he was about to be interrogated.

Weishen very rarely interrogated their agents, though.

“The risks of doing another copy mission are too high to be excusable,” Cao Lu told him and Yangyang a week after the break-in to Weishen. The two of them stood shoulder to shoulder (or they would if Yangyang were a bit taller), and the air conditioning nearly echoed in her virtually furniture-less office. She slid two briefing folders over the desk. “And we need to extract agent Xiaojun.”

Despite Weishen being partnered with Vision for their technology, Vision regularly kept technological secrets, and it was a necessary thing to keep tabs on them in order to understand the nanotech in their bodies. Weishen had long divorced their strain of nanotech from Vision’s, but the connection was still essential.

Dejun had been one of Weishen’s moles at Vision for years, now, arranging and organizing all their missions at the technology monolith—he was stunning at his job, allowing them to get in and out without detection. With the closing of this pathway, Dejun’s skills were more needed elsewhere.

Yukhei flipped open the folder and looked away from Cao Lu’s placid face to the classified briefing papers.

The words were blurry.

He blinked, brow furrowing as his eyes refused to focus. It felt kind of like when he’d been forcing himself to stay awake for too long, reading a good book. The words wouldn’t stop swimming outward.

After two seconds, his vision tunneled, then bloomed out, finally sharpening, and Yukhei let out a soft breath.

“Agent Lucas?” Cao Lu questioned, witnessing that weird-ass glitch.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, glancing up then immediately back down to addresses, times, data. “Thought a sneeze was coming on.”

 _Affiliated Agents: ~~Hendery~~ , Lucas, Two, Xiaojun…_

“Should we be worried about that first agent?” Yangyang asked, already flipping past the first page. “He was listed on our briefing last time as well, but you haven’t given us any information on him.”

“He wasn’t able to copy the files in time,” said Cao Lu, “and pulled his plug. His nanos self-destructed while he was connected to agent Xiaojun’s system. At the time, it was a riskier mission, and we miscalculated the difficulty.”

Yukhei’s stomach churned, and he finally moved past the first page.

 **{bear with me.}**

The process of Aeye converting him was slow, trickling down his body from his eyes. His hands developed tremors, the vertigo became recurrent, he would wake with muscle pain, fight nausea from eating or smelling anything, and he discovered what sensory overload was. He developed tics, then was made hyper-aware of them, paralyzed. 

**You’re rocking back and forth.**

He cried, cringing into the sheets of his tiny studio apartment cot. 

**You’re flexing our hands.**

“Leave me alone for a second.” 

**You’re talking out loud.**

**People associate self-talk with madness, but verbalizing can assist with emotional processing.**

Hysterical tears morphed into laughter, and he curled up on the mattress, pressing the thin duvet to his face. 

**That’s a soft material, but we’ll be cold in the winter.**

“Okay.” Money first with the job he still had even though he was barely functional. Money, coordination, functionality. He was crawling forward through the sheer insanity of getting his brain zipped open, trying desperately to train himself. He would get used to it, and then blankets and complex tasks could proceed from there. 

For the moment, all he could do was sleep or draw. 

He couldn’t remember the shape of Yukhei’s nose. Aeye’s imagery was warped and blurred by his own inaccurate, rose-tinted memories, and he was bad at holding anything in his brain for longer than a handful of seconds at a time. 

It had been months.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [twitter](https://twitter.com/speckledsolana)   
>  [curiouscat](https://t.co/zW26zmaxzw?amp=1)   
> 


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: injury

**I SAID STOP**

“How good of a tech was he?” Yangyang asked, then wrestled a bite out of his tough-breaded sandwich. The agency’s nearby deli had bomb-ass flavors, but their bread was something else. “Like, compared to me?” 

Yukhei stretched out his legs from the bench, organizing the loose accoutrements so his first bite wouldn’t land half its contents in his lap. “Pretty close. He was good—they wouldn’t send him if he weren’t,” Yukhei mumbled, leaning forward to sink his teeth in as autumn leaves skated across the park walkways. 

“See I don’t _get_ it,” Yangyang said around half a mouthful, “because it wasn’t _easy,_ but I had enough time to figure it out. With those sorts of things, if the firewall safeties are taken care of first, so long as you have enough time, nailing it isn’t a big deal. They must have given him a stupidly short amount of time, and I don’t understand why they wouldn’t find a way to give him more.” 

Shrugging, Yukhei tried not to let his stomach war against his lunch. The only information they were ever able to get was from Dejun, and Yukhei had never been able to snag him privately—not that it would make a huge difference. Yukhei couldn’t go rooting around for information about another agent. It was suspicious. Besides, Dejun probably didn’t know anything more than what Cao Lu had told them. 

Yangyang knowing they’d been together was a total accident, and Yukhei hadn’t even realized he’d spilled the beans until he was properly sober again. 

“Your mission was better prepared-for,” Yukhei said, “I guess.” 

Unhappy and skeptical, Yangyang made a noise around his next, ambitious hunk of a bite. 

**{sorry. there's a lot to get through}**

Months turned into more. What he thought were little steps turned out to be big ones, though he did get another blanket. 

Functionality could be faked, but his coordination issues kept evolving. He would achieve one milestone, then uncover some new difficulty like a buoy getting dunked by a new storm every month. 

The moment he figured out how to use his body in physically demanding ways again, for instance, was the moment he realized he could calculate trajectories in his head, curves, momentum, inertia, impact. He’d always been intuitively accurate with his body through practice and skill alone, but he was constantly reinventing the wheel with Aeye — learning how to walk again, interpret visual cues, process sound, _think._

Moving was no longer intuitive but jerky and stuttering, his body stop-starting and tripping over nothing. Some things he had to sort out quickly. Relearning how to walk and use his hands for simple tasks without his brain glitching and misfiring was urgent, and he had it down in two days, though he was shaky at best. 

Other things took much longer. Finite hand movements were impossible at best, climbing stairs was suddenly a panic-inducing exercise, running was difficult, sitting was clumsy, showering took hours. 

There was a period of time where his mind settled and was no longer overwhelmed by flavors, then had a major breakthrough in being able to identify not only individual spices, but individual minerals. He’d eat a carrot and have his brain rattle off all the nutrition info like a possessed health undergrad. 

Controlling his own brain was easier hoped for than done. Tackling new challenges for months turned into coping and adjusting for years, countless time lost between breakdowns and panic attacks and debilitating confusion, and life was a constant flow of exposure therapy. 

There had to be an end. There had to be limits. Artificial Intelligence could constantly evolve, but he was organic intelligence, and he couldn’t handle this ceaseless barrage. 

“We can’t keep doing this,” he told Aeye one day, rendered breathless after he sliced his hand open on accident over dinner and was promptly immobilized by a slew of molecular information and germ theory. “It’s not working for us.” 

He watched his hand stitch back together while holding the heel of his uninjured palm to Aeye, applying the pressure that didn’t realistically do much, but had become a habit — like medical practice for an open wound. His thoughts slowed to a lukewarm molasses, dragging for a moment as Kunhang braced himself for another epiphany. 

**I** , said his brain, and the entire kitchen froze over as something locked into place. **Me.**


	8. Chapter 8

**YOU'RE NOT LISTENING**

Agent Lucas was good at his job. Though a self-proclaimed bag-of-rocks-for-brains, he was, in fact, very smart. His skills were primarily kinesthetic and interpersonal. He was disarmingly winsome, knew how to use that to his advantage, and was very good at getting shit done. His entire person was a weapon that he knew how to use quite well, and in average circumstances, he was devastating. It was his job to be. Slap his half-dozen semi-to-full-fluencies on there, and he deserved a yellow-tape warning, probably. 

He was a remarkable person surrounded by remarkable people, though, and his confidence was—though rarely—shaken from time to time. 

Kunhang had done it the first time Yukhei had met him properly. Shaken him, that is, to his core. 

It was partially to do with how different Kunhang’s masteries were within the same skillsets. He was charming, but in a standby way, gaining trust less through his command of attention and more by making the people in the spotlight feel approved of, supported, brighter and more confident. He was physically adept, but opted for terrifying accuracy instead of strength or speed. He was linguistically talented, an incredible technician and hacker, bold and confident, and _goddamnit_ he was so funny. 

Yukhei, at their very first real interaction, had fought him, lost, been helped up by hands with a history of calluses, and had been completely ruined by that man going forward. 

Yukhei liked himself and had a healthy and robust handle on his own self-confidence. He knew he was fantastic and that others were too, but Kunhang had been stunning, and he didn't know how he was supposed to get over it. He never did. Still hadn’t. 

The morning they were supposed to re-infiltrate Vision, he woke up with Kunhang’s phantom voice in his ears and a brush of Kunhang’s clever lips against his, and he was still ruined. 

**{i'll speed things up, now.}**

Things changed. Somehow, the tiniest of mental shifts became everything: Aeye was him. He was Aeye. They were each other. That was that. 

It was difficult to explain — _he_ was difficult to explain. There was no way in hell he’d be able to sit anyone down and manage to tell them in any sensical manner that he was a Yin and Yang of human and computer. Though wrung out and traumatized at best, he was still Wong Kunhang, still motivated, optimistic, realistic, funny, warm. 

He hoped. 

It had taken him two and a half years to get to that mental point, but the six months proceeding from his major lightbulb moment were still difficult. Accepting that this was who he was and finding peace with that did wonders for the amount of distress he felt when things went sideways, but that didn’t _stop_ things from going sideways. He still got migraines, still missed the bottom step of the apartment building stairs and experienced the intimate feeling of having his heart in his mouth because of it. His handwriting was extremely slow, though he’d gotten the hang of his art. Gradually, he was regaining his stride in old combat moves, but he was still hesitating and pausing like an amateur. 

And the combat practice wasn’t just for personal satisfaction. 

Aeye was intrinsically created from Vision’s work — Kunhang had learned over the course of three years that Aeye was spawned on accident even as Vision was attempting to create it. It had then copied itself and removed its nature and code from the original files. 

Kunhang, sent to copy those original files but not knowing there was a duplicate that held AI, hadn’t been able to hack into those files successfully because he was up against the ones holding a goddamn artificial intelligence instead of a static file’s firewall. 

Apparently the “Please” had done it. 

In any case, Aeye still had that loose connection to the original files, and Kunhang had known the moment it happened that they’d been copied. Once loaded onto a network, deducing it was Weishen had been a cinch from there, though not a pleasant knowledge. 

The gradual realization over the years that his agency had not only invaded his entire being and had the power to destroy him against his consent, but had known the intimacies of his life — could have seen every moment he’d spent with Yukhei despite those being intensely, fiercely private to Kunhang — had turned him reasonably sour toward the entire company. 

Until recently, he hadn’t had the faculties to do anything about it but be sick to his stomach and anxious for Yukhei, whom he couldn’t see or protect to any sane degree. 

He’d gotten most of his shit together by the time Weishen obtained the files, though, and there was nothing he’d like less than Weishen being able to see the fundamental absence of crucial coding in the formula Vision hadn’t thought to investigate for years. 

While not an easy risk to take, getting into Weishen, corrupting the files, and hacking into their system just enough to leak through their static network — he couldn’t do anything about the nanotech yet — was the most convenient and ideal solution. 

Seeing Yukhei had simply been an added pleasure, even if it introduced a card into the stack that he couldn’t control. At least not fully. 

He’d meant it when he said Yukhei looked good. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [twitter](https://twitter.com/speckledsolana)   
>  [curiouscat](https://t.co/zW26zmaxzw?amp=1)   
> 


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: blood mention

**Y̷̮͔͐Ǒ̶̢̎U̶̘̤͐̎.̸̳̳͂̊ .̵͔̋͠ .̴̟͝(5,5)**

They didn’t need a ton of people for almost any mission to Vision—their infiltration was already sound enough that having greater than two to three people was more suspicious than helpful. Vision wasn’t equipped to require a large team. They were a tech company, not a rival agency. The biggest hurdles were tHeir technological safeguards, and Dejun was more than adept at jumping anything Yangyang couldn’t slink around. 

Nonetheless, Yukhei was once again Yangyang’s backup dEspite Sun Zhikun looking down his nose at his…failure, so to speak. He’d been perfectly functional on Yangyang’s first mission to infiltrate Vision and obtain the files, so there was no reason he couldn’t be on this one. 

They parked the car out of Vision’s security zone, and Yangyang shrugged on his hoodie with white-knuckLed hands. There was an uneasiness in Yangyang that hadn’t been there for that first infiltration. “You’ll be fine,” Yukhei said on instinct. 

“I just feel like they’Ll be ready for u—” 

_“There’s someone here.”_

Dejun’s voice over their earpieces had Yangyang launching out of the car, nearly tripping over the lip of the sidewalk while Yukhei shOved himself into the back of the vehicle. There, the seats flattened and he could yank out the curved panels against the walls to track Yangyang’s information. Yangyang was already synced, though not all of his tracker functions were yet switched on. His heart monitor blipped irregularly. 

“Slow down, Two,” Yukhei warned, and though Yangyang listened and slowed to a brisk walk, his BPM kept sledgehammering up and up. 

“What do you mean, Xiaojun?” Yukhei asked, flipping on Yangyang’s visual feed, then leaning across to the other side of the car to pull out the other pAnels so he could track Dejun as well. “Are you in danger? Connecting with your nanotechs in five.” 

RiGht as Yukhei was typing in Dejun’s code to the network, Dejun whispered, _“Oh Jesus.”_

The network connected, and Yukhei had a five-second visual of the eighth floor where Dejun was. Yangyang was almost running again as Dejun looked away from a ripped-up outlet in the floor where spArks were just tasting the air, away to the entire splay of cubicles and computers in the open room. 

There was someone standing at the center. 

Yukhei barely got a sense of what was happening before the entire scene was engulfed in shattering sparks, shrapnel, and massive clouds of whIte. Dejun’s visual feed went black the next second, immediately followed by all the rest of his data freezing, and Yukhei felt his blood pressure spike in panic. 

On Yukhei’s right, he saw Yangyang nearly throw out his neck looking up to watch as the whole building blared up in a siren for less than a split second, then went absolutely silent, all the lights flickeriNg out in one go. The eighth-floor windows were lighting up in brief flashes of orange before giving way to nothing but smoke. 

_“Shit,”_ Yangyang gasped and, in shock, all Yukhei could think was that the building would be so much harder to get into now.

 **{shall we get the ducks in order?}**

Just a touch of blood was enough. Aeye, long before Kunhang had busted Yukhei’s ear and made him bleed, was a part of Kunhang in every feasible way — beyond his veins and bones and into his skin, his hair, his eyes, self-monitored and set to self-destruct upon leaving his person if necessary, but that was always something the nanotech did. DNA was DNA and maybe Kunhang would feel invaded if he still believed Aeye was separate from him, but there was no point to that, now. 

It had taken seconds for him to pull his own nanotech in through Yukhei’s ear lacerations and override the simpler code without detection. Aeye had gotten plenty of practice on Kunhang’s own nanotechnology at the start. 

He’d known he wouldn’t have been able to overpower Yukhei without an advantage, and in such limited time, all he could think of was letting the cat out of the bag. Paralyzing Yukhei just as he thought he could while Yukhei’s nanotech was disabled in his ears. Not Weishen nor god would be able to hear Kunhang say what he had. 

But Kunhang wouldn’t do or be what Weishen was — not totally. He couldn’t condone a full takeover of Yukhei’s tech without his consent. What he did to his eyes and ears was a partial leak if anything, and it was incredibly finite. He couldn’t do both at the same time, nor do it very well. Distance, as it turned out, made it incredibly difficult to manipulate what little control he had over Yukhei’s senses without alerting Weishen’s system. It took him a day of headaches to get everything sorted, then adjust to the disorientation of having even minimal access to someone else — specifically Yukhei, who was not an insignificant someone. 

He’d had enough control and mental acuity to see the briefing, though, and had paused while restocking mangoes to first process the information he’d just gotten, then deal with the knockback migraine he developed trying to see something in high definition over so many miles with eyes that weren’t his. 

(It made his heart race to tune into Yukhei. The head pain was his punishment for violating Yukhei’s trust.) 

He didn’t know what to expect from Weishen even after reading the file Yukhei had unwittingly shown him — he didn’t know what Dejun’s orders were, and that was too big of a blind spot to ignore when it came to those original files. He needed them destroyed anyway. Preferably on his own terms. 


	10. Chapter 10

**_E R R O R_ **

He didn’t allow himself to hope that the person he’d seen—or thought he’d seen—was Kunhang. His wishes and pining could only go so far, and he had to deal with certainties, one of which being that Dejun was offline on a floor that had received significant damage and was filled with smoke. 

That was the priority. Getting into a high-tech building when all locks had been triggered by an outage was the priority. 

He left the car, but only because if Dejun were unconscious, Yangyang might not be able to get him out easily or fast enough on his own. Yangyang could only make his way in through the back door of the Vision building by prying off the digital keypad and fucking with the wires, and it took far too long for comfort to get inside the building. 

For most people, the dead blackout would have made it impossible to navigate even the ground floor’s open plan, but the nanotech gave a gentle advantage—enough to see clearly in grays and pitchy coal. 

They ran for the full flight of stairs at the other corner of the lobby’s back hallway, the layout emblazoned in their brains from the briefing files, and left the door behind them propped open with a decorative pot of artificial flowers. 

There was a quarter way left to the stairs when they heard the sound of an elevator’s doors being dragged open behind them. They froze, Yangyang fixing Yukhei with a frantic look. It could be Dejun, a janitor, security, a late worker, literally anyone. 

Yukhei reached for his weapon—still that same rod—even as he felt a sort of deja vu coming on. 

It helped in the end, because as someone hauled what was almost certainly Dejun’s body out of the elevator, Yukhei was already sprinting. 

The person (Kunhang. God. God, fuck, that person was Kunhang. They had to be. Even in the darkness, Yukhei could tell. It was the same outfit, the same ash-painted face, the same body—) didn’t even look up before dropping Dejun and running for that same door they’d just left. Yukhei raised his rod from eleven feet away and threw, leaping over Dejun just as the end of his rod hit Kunhang in the side and he staggered. 

Yukhei reached for him. 

And the world went dark. 

**{almost there.}**

He hadn’t meant to fall in love with Yukhei, though he supposed most people didn’t usually mean to fall in love with anyone. Not a lot seemed to matter when he liked someone enough — not rules, not reasonable guidelines, not sound caution. At least, that’s what he found out about himself after Yukhei, anyway. 

It was all more complicated in retrospect, but Kunhang still had no intentions of regretting any of it. Perhaps they should have known Weishen wouldn’t be moral with their power. Perhaps they should have been smart enough to stay away from each other. Perhaps Kunhang should have clicked on the first PAI5v9x3-VtR.cpp file instead of the second (the name was emblazoned in his head like a protein sequence: **project artificial intelligence, 5th type, version 32 - Vision team R** ). 

But what happened simply was, and while he hadn’t ever wanted this for himself, he was here, now, with a different modicum of control over his life. He was his own person, unmonitored, unwatched, with things no real human could reasonably do. And he’d lost Yukhei, but perhaps not permanently if he could just do this correctly. 

He had so little time. It was ticking down in his head even as he hijacked Dejun’s nanotechs through his busted nose in a slow, battery-driven elevator. He reached through the entire system he could get his hands on, its electric heartbeat quickening in his grip, and got a taste — just a taste — of the beast he’d have only hours to decrypt. 

And there was also the file, just as he’d suspected, uploaded to a hard drive the size of a small lithium cell in the hem of Dejun’s pants: PAI5v9x3-VtR.cpp. Aeye made finding that easy, his hands prickling like magnets. Kunhang didn’t hesitate to corrupt the little item between his index finger and thumb. Third time wasn’t the charm for Weishen, unfortunately. 

So little time. 

If Weishen didn’t suspect before, they’d be sure, now, that they had a mole within their ranks — even though they didn’t. And that meant Kunhang had only so long to get inside Yukhei’s head and rip him free. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [twitter](https://twitter.com/speckledsolana)   
>  [curiouscat](https://t.co/zW26zmaxzw?amp=1)   
> 


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: vomit mention, but not action

**BREACH**

“No—” It blurted out between Yukhei’s lips before he could think. Before he could consider running forward blind even as he staggered and choked on that one word, a gasp, a plaintive sound. He couldn’t see. It was as if his nanotech had burned out in his eyes and dipped them in tar. 

He could hear Kunhang getting away from him, the heel-toe heel-toe of the Weishen-commissioned shoes that all agents used, the slow and solid spinning of his rod coming to a stop on the lobby’s tiled ground. “Lucas!” Yangyang called from behind him, low to the ground and less than two feet away, as Yukhei fumbled for the nearest wall, palm slipping on the edge of another elevator’s doors. “What are you doing?” There was fear in Yangyang’s voice. He was most likely assessing Dejun. 

Yukhei was also afraid in a way he’d never been before, because his eyes weren’t adjusting. Everything was just dark. 

He heard the door so far ahead of him knock up against the flower pot they’d left. 

“I can’t see,” Yukhei breathed. 

Kunhang had been _right. there._

He felt Yangyang’s hands on him, taking his face into his hands, but still could see nothing. 

In the far, far distance, sirens leaked into the air. 

“What’s going _on?”_ Yangyang gasped, rhetorical, panicked. Things weren’t supposed to go like this. “What’s _happening?”_

They had to leave. They had to _run,_ and Yukhei couldn’t see. 

“H-hold him,” Yangyang said, guiding Yukhei to Dejun’s warm body and helping scoop him up. 

The sirens were getting louder, and Yukhei’s heart was collapsing as he held Dejun’s dead weight to his chest. Yangyang grabbed Yukhei’s sleeve, and Yukhei staggered into motion, a painful replay unraveling in his head of Kunhang slipping through his fingers twice. 

They managed to get out before the sirens clambered into their ears, Yukhei drifting in so many directions while his body only went in the one Yangyang dragged him, counting seconds in the hope that his sight would return. 

It did, but only when they got to the car, and it came back in a flash that made Yukhei wince in surprise and freeze, Yangyang frozen as well, halfway into the driver’s seat. 

“What?” Yangyang demanded. 

“Sight is back,” Yukhei said, blinking and taking in Yangyang’s drawn face. 

“What the fuck?” Yangyang asked. “What the fuck is going on?” 

**{i wish i knew more}**

Safety precautions were necessary, even when faced with his boyfriend — or who was once his boyfriend. He didn’t know where they stood anymore. Was Yukhei an ex? An old flame? Either way, Kunhang treasured the second he had, bruised ribs and all, to look Yukhei in the face again. 

He didn’t have to heal from a cracked rib this time, but there was an odd sensation he’d experienced looking back at Yukhei’s searching eyes. Yukhei squinted and blinked and pled, hands searching for stability, expression desperate, and for the first time, Kunhang realized that he’d died. Hendery had died. Yukhei had mourned him. 

So he didn’t leave with a cracked rib, but his heart was suffocating as he sank into an alleyway and fixed himself, wiping off the face paint and cleaning his hands to switch out his contacts from tawny to dark brown, suffering through Aeye’s fuss at having a dark lens over its cornea. 

For the first time in weeks, he wanted to vomit, and it wasn’t even because of vertigo. 

Seventy-five-percent of his brain was working on inscriptions and codes and the other twenty-five was trying to figure out if Yukhei could forgive him. 

He didn’t know. He couldn’t be sure. 

He picked himself up with his mask still fixed, hearing those distant sirens and imagining a car peeling off of a nearby curb. 

There was only one option for him, whether it was his right or not: home, where it was steeped in boyish blues and smelled of wax candles, if everything had remained how it had been. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [twitter](https://twitter.com/speckledsolana)   
>  [curiouscat](https://t.co/zW26zmaxzw?amp=1)   
> 


	12. Chapter 12

**LOCKDOWN̵̟̼̒**

They were sent home. Dejun woke up halfway through the car ride, and Yangyang almost hit the road’s verge in reaction, and there was so little they could explain. Yangyang kept his lips firmly sealed over Yukhei’s blindness, and Yukhei gave as little information as he could afford. 

“Was it the same person?” Cao Lu asked, packing up to leave the office already, by the looks of it, the clock on her desk reaching for 24:00. 

“I don’t know,” said Yukhei, and they were sent home. 

The sort of exhaustion Yukhei was fighting as he closed the door of his apartment behind him was the emotional kind. He was very well-acquainted with this particular desire to sink down to the rug on the floor without even taking off his shoes, and cease to feel, to breathe, to want. It hurt so badly to want. 

But he’d done this before, so he did manage to take off his shoes and haul himself into the shower to wash all the paint and sweat and unhappiness away, though he didn’t have the energy to meet his own eyes in the mirror. He was one of those people who looked good after crying, but he didn’t want to bask in that. Ever. Not over Kunhang. 

He didn’t bother redressing, pushing into his bedroom and crawling straight onto his mattress where he fell into the duvet and heaved out an exhale too large for even his body. It caught up halfway where his throat tightened around the three meters between his body and Kunhang’s before he’d gotten away from him. 

“Don’t move.” 

Yukhei wouldn’t be able to explain the war of instincts that blurred over his body the moment he heard that: one flight mode, one fight mode, and one obedience. Obedience first from fear of the unknown, then shock over the known. 

The last time Yukhei had heard Kunhang’s voice, it had been soft in the stairwell, brushing over his ear like a kiss. This time, Kunhang’s voice was sure and firm, and Yukhei did not move. 

“Kunhang,” he whispered into the coverlet. 

“Hi,” Kunghang said from somewhere behind him, and Yukhei’s heart seized as he felt the weight of the mattress shift at the foot of the bed. “Hi, Yukhei. I’m going to put something around your eyes. Is that alright?” 

His breath was coming fast, fingers curling into what purchase they had, throat closing. “I want to see you,” Yukhei said, and the words were wet and pathetic. 

“No, I know. I know. Please breathe,” said Kunhang, the mattress shifting more, his voice going smooth and warm, closer, slightly to Yukhei’s left. “Breathe for me. Calm your heart. I’m not leaving, I promise.” 

“I—why—Kunha—” 

“I hear you. Breathe. You have so many questions, but I have to cover your eyes, and then after that—after a few things—you’ll be able to see me, okay? And I’ll explain everything I can. Can I touch you?” 

The sobs Yukhei dissolved into were wretched—it had been three years since he heard himself sound like this—but he nodded into the sheets and shuddered through a stuttered inhale when he felt Kunhang coast his hand, callused and warm, up between his shoulder blades. 

“Hi, baby,” Kunhang said, this time soft and almost tender, and it had been so long that Yukhei didn’t remember how to translate Kunhang’s different inflections into emotions anymore. There was something about being touched that made Yukhei’s heart lurch and flutter, falling like snow. “I have a blindfold for you, and it’ll only be on for a little bit, okay?” 

Again, Yukhei nodded, unsure how to speak, and when Kunhang applied the lightest pressure to get Yukhei to lift his head, he did that for him without question. 

The blindfold was heavy and soft and brushed up against his eyelashes while he blinked through his tears. 

Kunhang pulled him to roll over onto his back, and Yukhei went still under the soft touch of Kunhang’s breath against his lips. 

“Can I kiss you?” 

“Please.” 

** {i've made a lot of mistakes} **

It felt cruel. It was cruel in so many ways to give himself over to Yukhei in such controlled and torturous pieces and to, in turn, have so much power over someone who just wanted to look him in the eyes. Kunhang had imagined this differently. He’d thought that maybe he could prick Yukhei’s finger with his pocket knife and work through his blood that way, but there was an uncalculated measure of suffering being so close to Yukhei and not knowing how to soothe him. 

Kissing him almost certainly wasn’t the answer, but in his distress-addled mind, he reasoned that he could draw blood that way, too, even if he’d promised answers and explanations. He did, in part, in between kisses that were so stunningly painful, Kunhang wasn’t sure how to breathe. 

Yukhei touched him back the moment Kunhang had puzzled himself into Yukhei’s parted lips, Yukhei raising his hands to draw through Kunhang’s hair and pull him close, closer, until his shower-cooled skin was turning warm under Kunhang’s hands. 

He got lost in the sensation, having forgotten his memories of touch over three years of isolation from any uncontrollable stimulation. His mind almost slipped past his control entirely, almost started panicking around a whirlwind of emotion and craving and soft, painful memories. 

**During kisses, the brain produces dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin, combining to activate the pleasure centers of the brain. Common side effects are euphoria, affection and attachment, relaxation, and — very little pressure has to be applied to break the skin of someone’s lips. Mouths are primed for healing and therefore will take less than a day to activ — Weishen nanotechnology accelerates the healing process to the effect that —**

Kunhang’s bite drew a surprised, hurt whine out of Yukhei that made Kunhang’s heart wobble. He caressed Yukhei’s temples with his thumbs and nursed over the small wound he gave with his tongue. “I’m sorry,” Kunhang said for so many things, but most immediately for the bite. 

“How are you alive?” Yukhei beat out, his voice so injured and earnest, fisting gently at Kunhang’s hair while Kunhang’s mind began to tunnel, to root itself in Yukhei and claw its way into Weishen’s monstrosity. He sucked on Yukhei’s lip again, pulse accelerating, trying not to panic as soon as he realized how much he took on tackling Weishen and all of these emotions all at once. 

“I never died,” he muttered into Yukhei’s lips, apologies bleeding from those words. “I didn’t — I couldn’t — ” What could he say? He put one leg over Yukhei’s abdomen and stooped, experiencing Yukhei’s hands on his waist again as he made up for lost time in kisses and drowning. 

He wouldn’t let go of this — him. Weishen had the power to wipe their agents, stealing and locking away their memories until they had clean slates for pawns. It was a precaution they had taken before Yukhei and he had been initiated, and it was one they would take again in light of the belief that they might be infiltrated. Kunhang was immune, but even after three years of silence, he couldn’t take the risk of losing Yukhei. Maybe wouldn’t take the risk of losing any of the agents, strangers or not. 

“Give me a second,” he asked of Yukhei, backing off the kiss to place his lips on his neck and trail listlessly, softly, while he plunged, Yukhei warm between his legs. “Bear with me,” he murmured while trying to steady his hands where they trembled against Yukhei’s skin, stripping whole strings of code away from a rotten core so deep it had been easy to overlook once upon a time. 

“I love you,” he told Yukhei with his lips against his ear as he got to the tight knot of control Weishen had and pinched it in his fingers. 

In the midst of Yukhei’s lips forming the reply, his whole body went slack under Kunhang and ceased to move. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [twitter](https://twitter.com/speckledsolana)   
>  [curiouscat](https://t.co/zW26zmaxzw?amp=1)   
> 


	13. Chapter 13

**I̶N̴T̶̲̩̃͝Ȑ̷͙̱̽Ư̶̼̘͐͘D̴͍̖̰͐͑E̵̢͖̹̦̋́̔͂ͅR̶̞̟̗͙͚̅**

He lost all sensation in the midst of reconciling his shock. 

“Stay with me,” he heard, though muddled, and he’d never pulled his plug before, but he was sure that this is what it had to feel like: the beginning of nothing, something slipping before he could catch it, falling in a dream except it was continuous and the hold of sleep was too strong. He could feel his system actively collapsing, his breath rattling in his ears, a migraine flash of lightning in the corners of his blind vision. It hurt in ways he didn’t know he could hurt, like his blood was attempting to run in reverse and pressurize his cells. He could hear it like being swallowed by a wave, but could glean nothing else—not Kunhang’s touch or voice, not the light on above him or the bed below him. 

Perhaps he cried through the midst of it, though he’d never know what it sounded like. 

Then it was over and he came into his body with a gasp, jolting under Kunhang as pain prickled up and across every nerve until his heart was crashing where his brain ought to have been and he was arching off the bed under Kunhang, a strained noise yanking itself out of his throat, senses crashing inward, then leaping outward, limbs buzzing with oversensitivity. He spasmed as if shocked, choking on regained breath and the sharp taste of the dehumidified air. 

“Hey, hey,” he heard, Kunhang’s voice honey-butter soft, creeping in through the throes of his hurt. “Wong Yukhei, relax.” 

When he opened his eyes, it was to starbursts and fissures that coalesced into light and shapes, then finally color, and Kunhang. 

What wind Yukhei had regained, he instantly lost. 

He must have taken the blindfold off for him. 

Kunhang’s expression flickered as he knelt, raised on his knees so he no longer sat against Yukhei’s skin. Yukhei had no words to say while Kunhang hovered over him, the breath heaving in Yukhei’s defibrillated lungs, mind pinwheeling from a rapid, dangerous spin to a weak, fluttering rock. 

Around Kunhang’s right eye were small, tan branches like ice and lace, highlighting his veins in a sort of patterning Yukhei couldn’t understand. “Is that a tattoo?” he asked as if there were nothing more important to say, and Kunhang’s hand darted up to his eye. His fingers were shaking with bad, visible tremors and jerks, and he lowered his hand almost as fast as he raised it, settling both on his tense thighs where they continued to shake from the pulsations of tension in his forearms. 

The bedroom light was lying like dust across Kunhang’s skin, making the divot between his eyebrows severe. His hair had gotten longer than he ever used to let it. He was thinner, cheekbones a little too sharp, muscles a little less defined under Yukhei’s palms when he finally raised his hands again to touch him—around Kunhang’s hands, up his thighs to his hips where he could push him back down. 

“They’re scars,” Kunhang said, a careful tint to the edges of his words as he settled uneasily against Yukhei’s abdomen. 

“Where were you?” _Why are you shaking? What happened to me?_

Kunhang closed his eyes. “I was…hurt.” 

“And—” The press of Kunhang’s fingertips to Yukhei’s lips made it so much clearer just how hard he was shaking. Kunhang’s eyes remained closed, almost squeezing, now, the lines of tension in his face clawing deeper. “Kunhang,” he murmured against the clamminess of his fingers, worry starting to burrow into his nerves to replace the fading pain. 

“I’m s-sorry, give me—give me one moment.” The grip Kunhang had on his own thigh dug in hard, Yukhei knowing, now, what it meant to shake like a leaf. 

Yukhei reached up to pull him down, and Kunhang resisted for only a moment before folding. His heartbeat was a mess against Yukhei’s chest, Kunhang’s jacket not nearly sufficient to hide it. 

**{he will never be one of them.}**

It was fitting that he was next to crumble apart. He couldn’t ignore Yukhei — his questions, his eyes, his pleading — even as Weishen did its best to tear into him in retaliation. He’d never fought on this front. He’d never fought at the front where he could be seen, and now he was digging an arrow into Weishen’s nanotechnological core where it hadn’t gone all the way through in his first attempt. 

If he hadn’t been distracted, perhaps it would have been a different story, but if his nerves had blood, they would be bleeding. 

He caved into Yukhei’s coaxing even as he resisted doing the same to Weishen. He was still only human, Aeye or no, and the strain of severing Yukhei from the mass before he’d taken down the whole system — god, he just couldn’t take seeing Yukhei like that anymore, and the statistics in his brain made him increasingly unsure if it would do permanent damage — was beyond his mental preparedness. More than half his energy was miles away, fighting five, then ten different Weishen hackers, while his heart was shredded into something resembling what it had been before. 

What a funny thing it would be if Kunhang lost this battle — no, this was the war — all because he couldn't take one more second of his old boyfriend teetering on the cusp of death. 

With a whine, he pushed hard against Aeye with his palm, tension pain needling through, and let himself lie heavy against Yukhei’s chest where he petted softly through his hair and rumbled something indistinguishable through his chest and from his lips. 

What Kunhang would have given to have had Yukhei to anchor him three years ago. It would have been almost easy to endure what he had. What _this_ would be like without him was a thought Kunhang didn't have the energy to process. Doing this alone would have been...too much. 

Yukhei didn’t complain when Kunhang drove his nails into his shoulders, didn’t try to shake him like a dead body. He just crooned and held him close while permutations and code ran faster and faster through Kunhang’s head until—

it broke. 

To Kunhang, it was almost audible. 

The system went down like a house of cards, scalding in colors Kunhang couldn't comprehend, and Kunhang held the joker that had slipped Weishen from its holdings, its plastic burning down to his fingertips. The network collapsed like thunder and spread to ash like a dust storm. 

The lash back into his body stung like a whip, and his brain pounded war drums in his skull with a dying reflex. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [twitter](https://twitter.com/speckledsolana)   
>  [curiouscat](https://t.co/zW26zmaxzw?amp=1)   
> 


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes. Yes I am adding a chapter to a finished work. Thank you in advance for your forgiveness and patience. You'll notice, if you've been here before, that Yukhei's part is new, while Kunhang's is mostly not. I hope what I've added contributes to the story as it deserves.

**. . .**

It was a little like a seizure, which was terrifying no matter how Yukhei spun it. The only difference was that Kunhang wasn't thrashing—he had these full-body tremors coming in waves, signaled by the pain in Yukhei's shoulder where Kunhang dug his fingernails in. His breath was hot and wet, and the pain in his eye was excruciating, it seemed. 

He had never seen Kunhang like this. All Kunhang had ever been was this solid, flexible thing, able to sidestep even the biggest barriers. It had always been fascinating to Yukhei how he could see Kunhang think—that gears were visibly turning behind his eyes, a gateway to something absolutely phenomenal. 

It wasn't like Yukhei _didn't_ use his brain, but his inner-workings were much more instinctual and practiced. Kunhang was...adaptable in a way most people weren't. Innovative in a terrifying way, except Yukhei liked to hold it hot and sweet on his tongue, and Kunhang had always liked to give it to him for his viewing pleasure. 

Here, Kunhang was struggling with something, and it was defeating. He was inadvisably thin, oddly gaunt in a way Yukhei couldn't describe, scarred, and trembling. 

And Yukhei just had to take it. He wasn't sure what else to do. Other than tranq-ing Kunhang—not that he just had tranquilizers in his apartment—all he could do was hold him. 

It gave him time. In the minutes that this pain gripped Kunhang and didn't let go, Yukhei regained feeling in his toes, which he hadn't realized he'd lost on the way, and his fingers became less clumsy. He could do nothing about his heart, which was pounding whether he wanted it to or not. It wasn't a holiday holding the love of his life in alternative and bewildering circumstances. 

His mind was racing in no clean direction, comprehending nothing clearly, so he simply let it run. He let it slam into the walls inside his head as he slowly put padding up, no longer attempting to comprehend anything at the moment. 

There was just…the singular thought: this is oh so very real. Bizarre, but viscerally, physically painful, and therefore real. 

Every encounter with Kunhang had been physically painful or debilitating, which was not something Yukhei would have predicted, but made this easy. Made knowing easy. Yukhei thought he should probably be more terrified of the man in his arms, but it was an odd thing living after loss. As always, he held a respectable amount of fear when it came to Kunhang, but the thrill and urgency of seeing him, holding him, far outweighed the _what if_ s. 

In the midst of the running train of Yukhei's thoughts, Kunhang gasped so deeply he choked, and his entire body tightened, stomach lifting off Yukhei's, one set of fingernails biting in, the other clenching around his own face from where Yukhei could barely see it with a craned neck. 

"Kunhang," Yukhei mumbled, holding softly to the back of his head. "Easy. Easy there. Easy." 

And Kunhang collapsed, but with breaths coming like a panic attack, and Yukhei held him tighter. He felt, through the thin material of Kunhang's jacket, the fierce and absurd beating of his heart. The way his ribs near-trembled. 

Yukhei didn't know for sure how he could tell the difference between one Kunhang and the next, but he thought that perhaps this was the one who was present. Who was returned from whatever had clutched him harder than Yukhei could manage. This Kunhang unlatched his fingernails from Yukhei's skin with a wet wheeze and made a sound halfway to a whimper, and Yukhei brushed his lips over the edge of his ear, fragile and intricate. It was the only skin of Kunhang's head that Yukhei could reach with the way Kunhang held to him and hid his face in the crook of his neck. 

Either way, Yukhei felt inexplicable relief, and he didn't even care to brace himself for anything at all. He could feel his own heart slow to a patter, and he couldn't care less about what happened next. 

**{how could he ever be?}**

“Hey, hey, Wong Kunhang,” Yukhei said, just like Kunhang had, and the laugh Kunhang garbled out between Yukhei’s jaw and his shoulder was more like a sob. “Relax,” Yukhei said, deep and slow, words hush-hush. 

It wasn't easy. Even as his mind revved down like the inner fan of a computer soothing, he could still feel the throes in his muscles and nerves, spasming against Yukhei's warm skin and sticking to where their connection had gone tacky in either of their moments of pain. He eased out these wobbly breaths like wind through aluminum mesh and let Yukhei continue to stroke the tips of his fingers through his hair, light against his skull. Slowly, he processed it. 

“I'm going to tell you a secret,” Kunhang said when Yukhei's presence finally hit him, and if he were given one more moment he'd start crying, which he did not want to do. His voice was stronger than anything had any right to be with what he’d just done. He knew Yukhei’s nanotechs were just freewheeling, now reprogrammed and independent. 

“Just one?” 

Kunhang liked him so much. Liked his softening humor, his earnestness and selflessness and reliable confidence. A laugh breathed out of him, stealing away into Yukhei's neck even as he was still shivering through cold sweat and mental pain. 

“I just corrupted Weishen’s whole nanotech system,” Kunhang said, starting with the blow. 

Yukhei tensed under him, but not in a way that made Kunhang feel threatened. He was too tired to calculate that kind of risk. “Why? Is that what happened? You disconnected me?” 

“It was another form of surveillance. They were watching us all the time,” Kunhang said. “Not just when we were hooked up. I disconnected you, yes.” 

“All the time,” Yukhei said. 

“All the time,” Kunhang confirmed. 

“How did you find out?” 

On this, Kunhang didn’t know what to say. _I got lucky, I got hijacked, I saw something I wasn’t supposed to —_

“I saw something I wasn’t supposed to.” 

Silence settled against Yukhei’s pulse. If Kunhang turned his head, he’d be able to kiss it with trembling lips. 

“Are you in danger?” Yukhei said, and the slowness at which he said these words wasn’t a croon. It was severe and deliberate. 

He’d dismantled their communication base, hid his breadcrumbs, disconnected every agent from the top down, deleted the backups, the files, destroyed the network. Finding him would take a miracle — he was thorough to a degree that wasn’t human. That he knew. 

“No.” 

They wouldn’t call their agents tonight. Too much was in shambles. 

“No,” Kunhang said again. “We have time.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [twitter](https://twitter.com/speckledsolana)   
>  [curiouscat](https://t.co/zW26zmaxzw?amp=1)   
> 


	15. Chapter 15

**.--. . .- -.-. .**

They stayed where they were for a long time. Hours, maybe, while Yukhei rolled his emotions around in his mouth. He didn’t say any of it aloud—especially once Kunhang’s breathing slowed and whatever fidgets he had ceased to continue—but he did say it in his mind until questions formed he could much more eloquently ask, though perhaps none of them were entirely fair. 

Because of that possibility, Yukhei elected to hold Kunhang tighter until he felt hours slide under his eyelids and drag him under, too. 

But when he woke, nothing had changed. He was stiffer, and there was an ache he was unaccustomed to in his body. 

“I left my contact in,” Kunhang said before Yukhei even knew he had woken, too. 

Yukhei hooked his chin down to look at Kunhang as he lifted himself off Yukhei’s chest ever so slightly. He was rubbing at his right eye again—the one he’d fussed over hours ago when he’d been in some sort of pain (perhaps the same kind Yukhei had experienced, though there was no reason he could be sure). 

“You’re wearing contacts?” 

Kunhang nodded, grimacing, and picked himself up off Yukhei and subsequently the bed. Yukhei had never witnessed Kunhang be so clumsy getting to his feet. He tripped with a mumbled, “Fuck,” shoulder grazing the nearest wall, and made his way to the bathroom. 

Yukhei waited, propping himself up and only then remembering just how naked he was. He could feel the imprints of creases from the duvet on the skin of his back, muscles slightly acidic and protesting with every movement. 

The tap turned on in the bathroom while Yukhei tried to figure out if he should cover his dick or not, but Kunhang reappeared before he could make a decision. 

His face was pink where it had rested up against Yukhei’s chest and throat, but it was his right eye that made Yukhei pause in his effort to drink Kunhang in. 

“It’s—” Kunhang began, crawling back onto the bed to sit next to Yukhei’s legs. He pressed his thumb up against the scarred dark circle under that eye, then above, and held it open for Yukhei to see. It was a little pink and irritated in the whites, but almost copper in the iris, lanced through with a flowering crown of gold in the center when Kunhang’s pupil narrowed. “It’s a token of my survival, I guess. It turned this way when I got injured.” 

He dropped his hand, and it sat limp near Yukhei’s thigh—not touching, but not trembling anymore either. The light in the bedroom was still on, though the day was starting to wash over the sky if the paler complexion of his entire room was anything to go by. 

It felt both wrong and right to see Kunhang there again. Where he used to be. 

“Did you…” Yukhei looked over the scarring around his eye. His eyebrow was odd, too, now that he was taking the time to look. “...get electrocuted, or something?” 

“More or less,” Kunhang said. 

“Can I—can I touch you again? It’s been…” Yukhei inhaled before his airways could close on him. “A really long time.” Even moments before felt too far away. He didn’t know what was happening, really, or what his future would look like, but he did know he craved this. 

Kunhang hesitated, meeting Yukhei’s eyes but otherwise not moving. “I’m really. I’m really sorry. About everything,” he said, blinking a little fast as the hand closest to Yukhei’s leg tucked itself under the fabric of Kunhang’s pants, increasing the distance. “I don’t—I shouldn’t have done any of that last night without apologizing first. I harmed you, I manipulated you. I’m so sorry.” 

Yukhei watched the patterns of distress in Kunhang’s face and how familiar they were, though far more severe than Yukhei had ever seen them. Kunhang felt so different while still the same. 

“You had your priorities in order,” Yukhei said, though it came out a bit like a wrestle with his throat. 

“No,” Kunhang protested. “No, I should have—” 

Yukhei grabbed him, sure the distance between them was over guilt and reluctance than lack of consent, and pulled him in until he had to fall on his wrist on the covers next to Yukhei’s opposite hip and stumbled his mouth across Yukhei’s sure lips. 

“You had your priorities in order,” Yukhei said, firmer this time, and said what he couldn’t last night: “I love you.” 

He wasn’t sure who Kunhang was anymore, who he had been or who he’d left behind, but he was sure that the vestiges he was seeing and whoever he was facing now was worthy of love just the same. And Yukhei loved him. That could be enough. 

**{i'll let my faults speak for me.}**

Everything ached — his eyes, his muscles, his brain, his heart — but he’d grown accustomed to these things in the eye of the storm, and the peace surrounding them, if only for a time, made Yukhei’s touch feel healing. More than any technology could ever be. 

The kiss started messy, but all of Kunhang’s mind was devoted to the subject: he got to relish in the recall of Yukhei’s plush lips, the handsome slopes of his face and rough morning shadow, the warmth of his vocalizations and the way he held Kunhang completely in unnecessarily large, gentle hands. 

Somewhere far enough away from them, an entire system had collapsed and left its leaders picking through the house fire, but here, his brain could dissect morning breath and find some kind of hilarious poetry in it from his human humor. 

Once upon a time, Yukhei and he had been lovers. 

And even now, after a certain point, it was slow and silly and full of laughter as Yukhei slurped at his neck and made Kunhang cringe and kiss silent “where were you all this time? I missed you”s into his face and ears, down his naked body while Yukhei pried off the only clothes that were left and laughed at the gooseflesh of the open air. 

Yukhei played Kunhang’s raised ribs like piano keys and snuggled up to his jaw, painting broad strokes with his touch over Kunhang’s body like the more he could feel, the more he could know. 

“Are you staying?” Yukhei asked as he bit roses into Kunhang’s hip bones and stroked his fingertips over the coarse kinks of hair around Kunhang’s shaft. Yukhei wasn’t one to disguise his own wants; this one was clear as day. 

“I have a shift at the store I work at in the afternoon,” Kunhang told him. “Sorting fruits. Lychee, mangos, the works.” 

Yukhei paused over Kunhang’s navel, and his laugh was so sudden it was basically a sneeze as he curled inward in amusement, and Kunhang reacted in mock horror, an ecstasy of interacting with affection and delight having already started to wrap around his organs and veins. “You just coughed on my dick.” 

“I just — you work at — you — ” Yukhei succumbed to a fit of giggles before burying his face between Kunhang’s thighs and letting his laughter turn fizzly against Kunhang’s sensitive nerves there. 

“It’s noble,” Kunhang quipped even as he reached for Yukhei’s hair and remembered its locks. Though anticipating it, he still flinched when Yukhei took him in his hand and wetted the head of his dick peeking out from his foreskin with the flat of his tongue. 

He couldn’t keep track of any singular strain of information his mind was giving him, overridden by just watching him. 

Kunhang was under no illusions — or he suspected he wasn’t. This was covetous, if not a plea: Yukhei sank down over him with a reverence that was cutting to Kunhang’s core. 

His soul had been muddy since the start of his mind being so loud, so new, so troubled, but he felt this in something different — not in the way his mind stirred in his fingertips or paced through his skin, but deep enough that his brain had no answer. Only abstractions, philosophy, poetry, art, color, film clips, history. 

_Stay,_ Yukhei was saying, beyond the short-term, engraving himself across Kunhang’s body all over again just like Lichtenberg figures. 

And Kunhang wanted to. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy birthday, Any. I hope this is a little bit of what you never knew you wanted, and I hope I did it all the justice it deserved.
> 
> [twitter](https://twitter.com/speckledsolana)  
> [curiouscat](https://t.co/zW26zmaxzw?amp=1)  
> 


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